Get in the Ring

And then suddenly... it was December. As if we'd skipped too many pages at once and had landed at the final chapter. It was the first day of the last month of 2008.

Worst yet, it was another fucking Guns N' Roses entry...



Excerpt from the lyrics of "Get in the Ring" off of Use Your Illusions II, W. Axl Rose:

I got a thought that would be nice:
I'd like to crush your head tight in my vice—
PAIN!!!

(spoken)
And that goes for all you punks in the press
That want to start shit by printin' lies instead of the things we said!!
That means you,
Andy Secher at Hit Parader!
Circus Magazine!
Mick Wall at Kerrang!!
Bob Guccione Jr. at Spin—
What, you pissed off cuz your dad gets more pussy than you?!
Fuck you!!
Suck my fuckin' dick!!

You be rippin' off the fuckin' kids
While they be payin' their hard earned money to read about the bands
They want to know about!!
Printin' lies, startin' controversy—
You wanna antagonize me??
Antagonize me, motherfucker!!
Get in the ring, motherfucker!!
And I'll kick your bitchy little ass...
... PUNK!!!

Excerpt from a recent Wired.com interview with Mick Wall:

Wired.com: I was wondering where you were when you first heard your name mentioned in that song. What did you make of it?

MW: I'd been warned a few months ahead of time that it was going to happen, then I heard it 'round a friend's house and it was a mixture of being kind of horrified, being kind of flattered, but mainly, to be honest with you, a little hurt because to be accused of lying, and ripping off, and all this stuff by a group that I had spend '87 to '90 working very closely with -- I was the first person outside America to write consistently and seriously about them, I had a TV show and a radio show over here, and this is pre-internet, pre-multi-music channel era. Even MTV wasn't part of the furniture over here in those days.

I had the only weekly rock show on TV and radio over here, and I was the only person playing "Welcome to the Jungle" on video and playing the album despite all the cuss words. Shortly after, I spent most of my time in LA, '88, '89, '90, I became very close to them. And I witnessed a lot of things that to this day, I've never written about, never discussed, because they were private things. They were very personal things, troubled things, and I felt that I was a guy they could trust. They gave me a gold record for GNR Live because of all the help I'd given them.

The whole thing with Axl came from an interview. He called me late at night, demanded I go to his apartment. Vince Neil had been saying some stuff about him and he wanted to set the record straight. There's always a vendetta going on somewhere with Axl. And I got there at like 1 am, and I left at like 5 am, and we did an extraordinarily long interview all about how he wanted to duke it out with Vince, and he was going to kill that motherfucker, and all the rest of it. A few weeks later, as I'm writing the story, I realize how heavy this looks, so I call him on the phone. I taped that conversation also, and I said to him, "let me read you this, because to me this sounds heavy, and I just want to make sure this is how you still feel, and you still want to do this." I read it to him, he laughed, and then he said, "I stand by every single word, motherfucker, go ahead and print it." So I did. And literally within a week or two of the story appearing, as far as he was concerned, I'd made the whole thing up. I was a dirty rotten limey journalist who can't be trusted, and had lied about what went on, and misquoted him.

I mean, it broke my heart, because this wasn't just some guy I'd met once and interviewed and there was a misunderstanding. The reason he called me so late at night, as I'm getting into bed, is because I was the go-to guy, certainly outside America. He had a close friend in LA who was a writer he would talk to also, but at that point I was the guy that would do Britain and Europe and all the rest of it. And it really hurt. What hurt more was not so much Axl -- because I knew he was crazy -- but the other guys having to toe the line. The next time I saw them it was awkward. Duff walked straight past me, which broke my heart, because again, we had some very personal occasions where I'd felt I'd helped him a lot.

Anyway, cut to many years later and we're still talking about it. In some ways it conferred a degree of fame or notoriety, or name recognition, and that hasn't been a bad thing always. Slash has since apologized. Steven asked me to ghost[write] his autobiography, which I didn't do in the end. Izzy and I have had a good laugh about it. Duff is still really weird about talking to me, which is strange because he seems so together these days. My feeling is that he's embarrassed and just doesn't want to go there.

And Axl, the last time he played London, there was a guest list and there was a shit list. There were people employed to walk around the gig, and anybody on the shit list had to be ejected. Guess whose name was top of the list?